Chapter 56 11.1 Out of entity

It's hard to say exactly what John Perry Barlow does.He owns a farm in Pine Valley County, Wyoming, and has also run for a Republican seat in the Wyoming Senate.To postwar baby boomers, he would often introduce himself as a backup lyricist for the old underground cult band The Grateful Dead.For this role, he quite relished, the main reason is that it can cause some confusion in people's minds: a "best friend", but a Republican? At any given moment, Barlow could be busy launching a whaling ship in Sri Lanka (so conservationists can monitor the migration of gray whales), or he could be discussing the future of free speech and privacy at some Institute of Electrical Engineers. Giving a speech; he might also be brainstorming with Japanese entrepreneurs about the integration of the Pacific Rim while soaking in a hot spring in Hokkaido, or formulating plans to colonize Mars with the last space visionary in a steam bath.I met Barlow in an experimental virtual conference room called the WELL, where no one was physically present.His character in it is a "mysterious hippie".

Barlow and I met at the WELL and worked together for several years before we met in real life.In the information age, this is often the case with friends.Barlow has about 10 cell phone numbers in several different cities and more than one electronic address.I never know exactly where he is, but I can always reach him within minutes.This guy even flies with a laptop that plugs into the cabin phone.The number I dialed to reach him could have taken me anywhere in the world. I'm frustrated with his disembodied state.When contacting him, I would be in a state of confusion if I didn't even know where on earth he was.He may not mind this state of decline, but I do.When I dialed the number I thought was his in New York, but unexpectedly I was swept over the Pacific Ocean by him, and I suddenly felt like I was being stretched.

"Where the hell are you now, Barlow?" I asked impatiently once.We were in the middle of a lengthy call discussing some very difficult but critical issues. "Well, when you called, I was in the parking lot, and now I'm repairing my suitcase at the suitcase shop." "Oh, why don't you just have an operation and just install the receiver in your brain! How convenient that is, you don't need to use your hands." "That's exactly what I thought," he replied, without the slightest sense of humor. Relocated from the empty Wyoming, Barlow now lives in the vast wilderness of cyberspace.Our previous conversation took place on this frontier.As the science fiction writer William Gibson once predicted, the vast electronic network wrapped in cyberspace is quietly expanding in the "underground" of the industrial world, like tentacles or vines stretching out.According to Gibson's science fiction novel, in the near future, explorers in cyberspace will "plug in" into an unbounded maze of electronic databases and video game-like worlds.A cyberspace scout sits in a small dark room and directly connects the "cat" (modem) to his brain, and he can directly browse the invisible world composed of abstract information in his mind, just like in some boundless world. It's like shuttling through an endless library.There are indications that such cyberspaces are already emerging in bits and pieces.

For the mysterious hippie Barlow, however, cyberspace is more than that.It's not just an invisible empire of databases and networks, and it's not just some kind of 3-D game that requires special goggles to enter, it's a whole world of every incorporeal existence and all digital information.In Barlow's terms, cyberspace is the world that you and your friends "exist" in while you're talking on the phone. At one point, Barlow told a reporter, "There's nothing more intangible than cyberspace. It's like having your whole body removed." Cyberspace is the hub of online culture.The counterintuitive logic of distributed networks and the idiosyncratic behaviors of human society meet here.Moreover, it is still expanding rapidly.Thanks to the network economy, cyberspace has become a resource that becomes more and more abundant as it is used.Cyberspace, Barlow quipped, "is a special kind of real estate—the more you develop it, the bigger it becomes."